:: 50 Words per minute on your Palm ::
I am obsessed with keyboard and data entry problems. I still remember buying my first PDA and gleefully taking it to a meeting with a client. I had the idea that from now on I would record everything electronically. Several problems soon became apparent. I won't bore you with all of them, suffice to say that the need for a constant-sync device was near the top of my list, but wireless PDAs have arrived, so it's nearly an irrelevant problem (but for many glaring holes in the whole wireless PDA approach, but that's for another time).
The biggest problem, and one that led me to end up buying and trying a range of form factors, was the ability to type accurately and fast enough. Since then, I have agonised over this issue, even attempting to invent my own solutions (on paper at least). I recently blogged about the Fastap keyboard, which I finally got to play with. I got excited by the prospect of being able to engage in IM sessions via a small device. Personally, I use IM a lot. I find it a serious and valuable business tool, although too much use begins to nag me, mainly because it can easily end up being an inefficient use of time due to the pauses and slow typing.
 Getting to the point, I recently found out about the FITALY keyboard and Instant Text technology from Textware Solutions. Its design is a departure from the QWERTY layout and it has been optimised for one-finger, or stylus, operation. The principle is based on analysing the frequency of letter-to-letter transitions in a representative corpus of the English language. Based on the distance of transitions, the FITALY keyboard has been proposed. There are plenty of examples of how the keyboard enables a higher word rate than the QWERTY layout when being tapped by one-finger or a stylus, hence the claim to 50 words a minute on a Palm, the average otherwise being about 12. That's a good improvement for my money.
Textware solutions have other products, like Instant Text that use abbreviated access to word and sentence completion, but without the need to memorise the abbreviations. I found this particularly attractive because I had previously invented a similar technology to search for people in a a large contacts database using abbreviated access to any information in the database, like first name, surname, company name, email domain, bits of a phone number and so on. This was more as an aide memoire for recalling names remotely via a text-message (SMS) query and maximising the chance of finding the right match, even with the sketchiest of input. We called this technology SmartName and attempted to patent it, though we didn't in the end.
This point about patents brings me closer to the conclusion. I started this weblog mainly to document ideas as and when I had them, at least so they were in the public domain where they might be useful to someone, recognising that my resources for patenting things is limited. That's why the theme of my weblog is more about connecting ideas and making links, not about news snippets, which seems to be a common blog format, which gets tedious if you get caught up in the blog stories loops - blogs that blog from other blogs from other blogs....loops that raise the noise floor a bit too much for my liking.
So my connected thought for this story was recalling how the Fastap keyboard felt a little odd at first due to its unfamiliar layout. I'm used to a QWERTY keyboard and somewhat used to the 2abc 3def keyboards on phones, but the Fastap layout was an ABCD... affair. I shoud hasten, in defence of my friends at Digit Wireless, that this in itself is not a problem. As was pointed out to me, I thought that the letter "a" was on the "1" key when asked, but it turns out to be on the "2" key, thus proving that I am used to the layout by tactile familiarity, even though I don't actually remember the mapping. I think this was the point being made.
The FITALY keyboard is another departure from QWERTY or ABCD, but that presumably is not a problem with regular usage. What immediately came to my mind is how well might the Fastap keyboard work with the FITALY layout? The point is that the Fastap keyboard does not have to be constrained to a 10-digit grid, and that the FITALY is a layout optimised for one-finger (or I guess two thumbs). Hence I propose a FITALY layout for Fastap. I would love to try it anyway.
6:37:05 PM 
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